Risograph print inspired by Natalie Brown
A leadership assessment, a hard piece of feedback, and the cost of optimism.
We did a manager assessment this week, the kind that sorts you into color energies. Mine came back heavy on the warm, expressive end: enthusiastic, persuasive, quick to see the upside. Roughly the same profile I had when I took a version of this twelve years ago. Some things hold.
In the same stretch of conversations, I got a piece of feedback that sat next to the assessment uncomfortably well. The gist: I can be too optimistic. Not in a way that feels bad in the moment, that’s the trap, but in a way that lets a team arrive at a checkpoint genuinely surprised they’re behind. The warmth that makes people comfortable enough to take risks is the same warmth that can smooth over the signal that something’s wrong.
I don’t think the answer is to become someone colder. The optimism isn’t a costume. It’s how I actually keep a team moving through ambiguity, and a lot of people do their best work because the room feels safe. Stripping that out to look more serious would cost more than it saved.
But the feedback is correct, and pretending it isn’t would be its own kind of optimism. What I’m sitting with is that psychological safety and honest accounting aren’t opposites, even though my instinct treats them like they are. I tend to protect the mood when the more useful move is to trust the team with the real picture. People can hold “this is hard and we’re behind” and “I believe we’ll get there” at the same time. I’m the one who’s been assuming they can’t.
I don’t have this resolved, which is why it’s in the log and not in Toolbox. The open question I’m carrying into next week: how do you tell a team the truth about where they stand without dimming the thing that makes them want to try. I suspect the answer is that the optimism has to attach to the people and the path, not to the status. You can be relentlessly positive about what a team is capable of while being completely flat and honest about where the work actually stands. I haven’t been separating those. I’m going to start.